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Wednesday, June 12, 2002 |
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SpamAssassin sounds like great way to kill spam. Simson Garfinkel writes glowingly about it, and notes that Dave Farber is a convert. SpamAssassin only runs on UNIX for right now, but that works for me.
8:33:28 PM 
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Patrick Delaney has written a splendid essay on using blog technology to help children learn to research and write. The title of the project is an instant magnet: Find It, Read It, Write It. It's a wonderful idea, but I confess after I read it I'm still trying to fit it into my world model. It grabs at me in a number of ways:
- The project is an outgrowth of the Bay Area Writer's Project. The BAWP's co-director is - or was, I don't know - Rebekah Kaplan. Ms. Kaplan was one of my english teachers at Foothill High in Pleasanton, CA. I do remember Ms. Kaplan, but I can't honestly remember a lot about her class.
- The approach sounds reminiscent of the things Montessori schools try to do in getting kids to learn to do research. Montessori focuses in part on asking questions: before you go off to do research, the child needs to generate a list of questions they'd like to answer about a topic. This hopefully encourages the child to go out with an inquiring mind, and not just a shovel ready to scoop up whatever they find. (It works: last year a group of children from our Montessori school went up to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. The Aquarium staff was most impressed by the kids: they had rarely seen a group with so many questions.)
- The project title reminds me of a couple of books by William Zinsser: Writing to Learn and On Writing Well, both of which espouse the idea that writing is one way to go about learning something.
And it all pulls at me for the same reason I started this weblog: the sense that writing is something that can help pull it all together.
It's a great idea, but one I haven't taken to heart. I've been at my new job at Georgia Tech here for almost three weeks, and I haven't written much down yet. I'm unsure of where and how to go about it. At my last job I started an internal Wiki to help document what I was finding out. Here I could use this blog, but I'm sensitive to the line between work and home, which is another way of saying I'm still new in this job, and don't want to screw it up. I don't think I know much dirty laundry about Tech yet, but I still want to be careful.
5:07:46 PM
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Paolo Valdemarin's weblog (excerpted below) suggests that the sources for news aggregators would include "reports generated by your accounting software, the status of your servers ..updates from your co-workers workflow management software." At first blush, this sounds great. But how do you prioritize those kinds of items? At what point does your news aggregator start to resemble the fire hose that email has turned into?
At least an aggregator only pulls in the sources that you select, but we've only removed some of the random junk from the information flow: we still have to make sense of it. Radio's aggregator at least groups content by source, but it still harkens back to the early days of email: when you get enough stuff coming at you, it all starts to blur.
Scripting News: A news aggregator is "software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page."
[Paolo comments] It's important to consider that "set of news sources" could also mean reports generated by your accounting software, status of your servers, posts in a discussion group, orders from your e-commerce site, updates from your co workers workflow management software ... got it?
[Paolo Valdemarin], found via [The Shifted Librarian].
4:17:02 PM
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Up until this year, EPSN had a neat feature that displayed the various baseball division races as a graph. The graph typically showed how many games over .500 each team was. It was a very clear visual way to see how a team's fortunes rise and fall over the season: you could really see it when I team made a sustained run. ESPN dropped that feature this season, but now Sportsline has picked it up. Check out the Sportsline MLB standings, and click 'Race Chart' in the header of one of the divisions.
Caveats: it's a Java app, and further more it seems to lock up Mozilla when I try to close the window. Works ok in IE, though. [Later note:] What seems to kill Mozilla is trying to deal with the popup window. If you use this direct link to the Race Charts, Mozilla seems to be able to cope when you close the window.
3:51:20 PM
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After looking at warehouse.com, I was under the impression that memory for a G3 400mhz iMac (the kind we have in the house) was running around $80 for 256mb, and $200 for 512mb. I just found a site called ramseeker; they provide price comparisons from a variety of vendors. According to them, 256mb can be had for between $35 and $50, and 512mb for around $90. That's more like it.
ramseeker doesn't sell memory; they claim to be a free service comparing prices for Mac memory. Very useful.
I still don't want to pay for it. The Mac belongs to my wife's work, so I'd like them to pay for it. I don't think that's real likely right now.
3:31:44 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Paul Holbrook.
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